


pax, lux

by magicites



Series: down, down the rabbit hole [2]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Character Study, F/F, MORE Riku pining for Sora in the background, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Worth Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:40:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23398624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magicites/pseuds/magicites
Summary: “Did you love him? The Riku Replica?” Kairi asks.When Naminé finally speaks, it isn’t the answer Kairi expects. “Do you love your pencils? Your pens?” Off Kairi's nod, she continues. “And when they break? Run dry? What do you do?”“If it’s a pen I really liked using, I’m sad to see it go, but...” She trails off, glancing at the empty pen in her trash can.Kairi fills the silence with another question. “What do you love?”Naminé answers with a picture: a yellow canary in a cage, the metal door blown wide open.(Kairi and Naminé, post Re:Mind.)
Relationships: Kairi/Naminé (Kingdom Hearts)
Series: down, down the rabbit hole [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1683118
Comments: 6
Kudos: 57





	pax, lux

**Author's Note:**

> title roughly translates to "peace and light"
> 
> you don't have to read the first part in this series to understand this, but the two fics are thematically similar and i think they compliment each other well! 
> 
> sometimes the most radical act you can do is love women and i think that's a pretty cool thing for kairi to get to do, ya know

In the depths of Merlin’s training grounds, Kairi lulls her racing mind to sleep with the same fantasy.

Xehanort, defeated under the combined strikes of herself, Sora, and Riku. The war, ended with a decisive victory. Her home, unfurling before her to a blooming life of joy and peace.

Naminé, waking up amongst the rainbow of colors Radiant Garden has to offer. Icy blue eyes meeting warm ocean waves. Kairi’s hand, outstretched, there to guide her ghost back to the world of the living.

She only saw Naminé - truly saw her, not in dreams or in stolen memories but in flesh and bones and a fledgling heart - a few times. She never saw her smile, just the concerned furrow to her brows as she became another name on the ever-expanding list of people who have thrown themselves away for Kairi’s sake.

She lets herself imagine pale pink lips splitting open, her joy spilling forth like petals caught up in a breeze, misting Kairi’s heart with joy the way spring showers mist her skin. 

It becomes part of the routine: burying her face into her pillow to hide her smile, thankful that no one else is around to see her naïve youth on full display.

* * *

What happens is this.

Kairi gives Naminé away in secret, with only Sora standing as both witness and executioner. Her eyes are closed as his keyblade unweaves the tapestry Naminé has spent her entire non-existence trying to quilt together. He moves with care, cutting seams and unwrapping stray threads with all the care of a seasoned tailor. By the time he finishes, the crystalline bloom that Kairi’s heart has become is free of every pale blue tip Naminé ever offered.

She keeps her eyes closed tight, lest they fly open and Sora sees the panic that seizes in her chest. Freedom means leaving, and leaving means loneliness.

Then she is gone, and all Kairi can greet is Sora’s sunny smile.

“Aaaand done!” he announces. “Riku’s on his way to pick her up now. Naminé’s gonna go to Twilight Town on his gummi ship and feel like a real princess! Pretty great, huh?”

Kairi has yet to hear the stories, but there are nights when what few memories Naminé called her own seeped into Kairi’s dreams. Even filtered through the shadows Naminé casts her life in, she knows the look Riku’s Replica gave her.

It’s the same look Riku gives Sora whenever Sora isn’t looking. 

For all the ways Riku’s song harmonizes with Sora’s in a way Kairi’s never can, he’s surprisingly bad at deciphering the meaning behind the melody. If Sora and Riku are complimentary chords, then Riku and Naminé are a major and minor one step away from flowing.

She doesn’t understand how Sora remains deaf to the dissonance. 

Vines curl up from Kairi’s unblemished heart, curling close around her windpipe.

She smiles at Sora, all lips and no teeth.

* * *

“Kairi?” Naminé asks from within the colorful expanse of the small home she’s claimed for herself. Kairi had wanted her to return to the islands with her. She wanted a bed set up in the space across from hers. She wanted paintings adorning her walls, colored in paint and crayon and colored pencil and every other medium Kairi has only ever destroyed in her attempts to create something beautiful.

Instead, Naminé lives in a small apartment in Twilight Town, hidden away on the edge of the woods.

“Yes?”

“Have you noticed a…” Naminé trails off, fiddling with the hem of her pristine white dress. She looks so out of place amongst her surroundings. She is not an inkstain on an unblemished page. She is a gap waiting to be filled in. “...A change, in your relationship with Sora?”

Kairi trains her face into a serene smile. Fine needlepoint work digs into her skin. “Not at all. Why? Did something happen?”

He’s tried so hard to hide how fast he’s fading from her. The least she can do is play along.

“His connections are weaker than before. I can’t figure out why.”

Naminé casts a meaningful glance at Kairi. She feels like the clouds have just blocked out the sun, casting her in cold shade.

_It’s my fault,_ Kairi almost says.

“He’ll come to us when he needs help,” Kairi says quietly, remembering the way Sora frantically tugged his gloves further down the last time he saw Riku approaching.

* * *

Naminé shows Kairi a drawing of the Final World, where the sky meets the sea.

Sora is translucent amongst the waves.

“I’m sorry,” Kairi says softly.

“It’s okay,” Naminé says. Her smile is kinder than Kairi deserves. “I know you’ve seen some of my memories, but I don’t think you’ve ever heard what happened at Castle Oblivion.”

Kairi shakes her head. Naminé’s gentle voice guides her through a story built upon so many lies that it’s a miracle Naminé ever learned to taste truth.

It’s why Naminé offered Xion a choice, unobscured by the veil of softened language hospice patients so often give. There is nothing more violent than the sudden stop of death.

Kairi would know.

* * *

_He’s only missing,_ they say.

“Do you honestly think we’ll find him?” Kairi asks.

Naminé is so much more than she ever thinks she is. 

An optimist is not one of those things. 

“I’ve never had a single moment in my life that I couldn’t sense him. I can still feel the people close to him without any issue. Their memories aren’t broken. They just end.”

Naminé sniffles, frosted tears gathering at the corners of her eyes. Kairi pulls her close and swallows her shock at how much cooler Naminé runs than she does. 

Naminé sobs quietly into Kairi’s shoulder.

Kairi stares forward.

* * *

Kairi catalogues the differences between herself and Naminé in the spaces where her thoughts are still too scared to dwell. Naminé’s face is rounder. Her eyes are a lighter shade of blue, approaching frosted glass under the light of the summer sun. Her fingers are thinner, longer - a work of art in their own right. Her skin is paler, the tops of her shoulders unmarried by freckles and moles the way Kairi’s are. 

“This body is from the Riku Replica, right?” she asks. “You don’t look anything like Riku.”

She knows the story, a little, absorbed the fragments and piecemeal Sora liked to scatter when talking to Kairi. There’s nothing he loves more than talking about Riku, any Riku at all. 

“Replicas take on the features of the heart that they shelter,” she says, sounding entirely like a textbook. Kairi wonders if the ability to read transferred over from herself. It must have. “He gave this body to me. He’s not here anymore, but his gift is.”

Ah. She wears her guilt like Kairi does, sprinkled over her words in a fine mist. 

“Did you love him?”

Naminé stays silent for longer than Kairi expects. Long enough for the silence to pull at her heartstrings. She’s taken back to a memory of being seven and too proud for her own good, crossing lines drawn in the sand and never quite being able to learn that the world is a kinder place when she carved off pieces of herself until even the line stretched longer than her scattered remains. 

When she does speak, it isn’t the answer Kairi expects. “Do you love your pencils? Your pens?” Off Kairi's nod, she continues. “And when they break? Run dry? What do you do?”

“If it’s a pen I really liked using, I’m sad to see it go, but...” She trails off, glancing at the empty pen in her trash can. 

Now, Naminé hums. A reassurance that some secrets can remain unsaid. 

Kairi fills the silence with another question. “What do you love?”

Naminé answers with a picture: a yellow canary in a cage, the metal door blown wide open.

* * *

Kairi finds solace in Naminé’s studio. She’s spent so long staring at Naminé’s art that she’s finally able to see past the beauty. She covers scars with ink and soft shading. 

Sometimes the scars still peek through.

Kairi leans over Naminé’s shoulder as she finishes her latest drawing: a dark forest, where a single hooded figure walks. Their maroon cloak stands out against the grays and greens. It isn’t a spot of hope.

It feels like a speck of blood.

“Who’s that supposed to be?” Kairi asks, forcing a smile.

Naminé tilts her head to look Kairi in the eyes, the color as cool as the breath against Kairi’s lips. For a terrifying moment, she wonders if she’ll lose control long enough to close the distance between them.

She doesn’t.

“You can’t tell?” Naminé says. “It’s you.”

* * *

“Naminé.”

Naminé hums in response, quietly, as to not disturb the solemn night air around them. There are no stars in Twilight Town, but they scatter across the skies in Radiant Garden. 

“Will you tell me more about Castle Oblivion? And… and the year you spent with Riku after,” she says. Of all the stories Sora told her before he died, that was one of the few he never gained access to. The memories that hold his time there are still unlinked, doomed to reside at the bottom of whatever is left of his patchwork heart.

Naminé has held them all, until they stained her hands with the clinical smell of steel and heartache. She answers with a faraway look in her eyes, seeing a world of white that no longer exists. 

She doesn’t give a beginning, middle, and end, the way she did the first time she told the story. This one comes in fragments. 

In some ways, it feels more real. No longer scrubbed clean of impurities.

She tells a story of a canary trapped in a cage, of a hammer bent so out of shape that it became unrecognizable to the welder himself, of peony-sweet lies and lilies-of-the-valley that whistled death between their petals.

She tells the story of fingers tight around her chin, the rolling threat of thunder so close to her skin that it made the fine hairs on her face stand on end. Kairi thinks of a low monotone and a cold jail cell in a world that wasn’t meant to be, and she understands.

Her gratitude and her shame fight a war deep in her stomach. In the end, her sympathy triumphs over all.

Naminé talks of a Riku rendered nearly unrecognizable to Kairi. In that empty world, it was Kairi who saw through the marks of his trauma made real and recognized the heart of her best friend within. It was Kairi who brought Sora into the light of understanding, who kept him from lashing out at the person who gave his very selfhood to save him.

Somewhere along the way, Riku shed his haughtiness the same way he shed his childhood clothes. A raised chin gave way to reverent eyes, to touches afraid to fully connect for fear of what strength would lie behind, to a strong voice purposefully kept low and soft. 

That is the Riku Naminé knows: one so hollowed out by grief and so driven by devotion that sometimes the only thing that’s remained unchanged is his name.

Kairi can’t help but wonder if that’s true.

Who is Riku, if not someone meant to save Sora?

And who is Kairi, if not someone meant to be saved by Sora?

* * *

“You’ve made your choice,” Naminé says. They’re back in Naminé’s studio in Twilight Town. Kairi wants to shift, lessen the pressure on her aching wrist (the same one that always aches, now, the one she has to shake phantom fingertips off of), but Naminé specifically asked her to model. She can’t let herself mess up a task as simple as this.

She’s already messed up so much.

“Do you hate me?” Kairi murmurs. “Riku does.”

“He doesn’t hate you. He’s just sad.” Cold eyes flick back down to the canvas. She’s using paint today, the set a joint gift from Axel, Roxas, and Xion. She had said the pink that came with the set was the perfect shade for Kairi.

Kairi smiles, choosing not to believe her but knowing better than to protest. Naminé’s stubbornness is cloaked in a gentle voice, but sometimes even silk can prove hard to tear.

“Can I visit you?” Naminé asks.

“Why would you want to?” Kairi asks before she can stop herself. Naminé’s wrist goes slack as her gaze freezes Kairi in place.

Her paintbrush falls to the ground. That patch of carpet may not be anything other than pink ever again. 

A lifetime passes in the time it takes Naminé to answer. 

“I like you.” She bends down to pick up her brush. “It wasn’t obvious?”

Kairi can’t wipe her tears as they stream down her face. She doesn’t want to ruin Naminé’s painting, not when she’s already ruined her carpet and Riku’s friendship and Sora’s life.

Without a word, Naminé carefully sets down her supplies. She grabs a rag - unused, since she always brings a spare just in case - and leaves the safety of her canvas to stand in front of Kairi. She leans down until they’re eye level.

That rag pressed against her tear-tracked cheeks, frayed at the edges and stained blue at the corner, feels like the greatest gift Kairi has ever received.

* * *

When Kairi arrives at the castle, Naminé is already there.

Kairi almost thinks of hiding. She had made a point not to tell anyone when she was planning on sleeping. She had made Ienzo swear not to tell anyone else.

“Kairi?” Naminé asks. “Oh. I suppose I never told you. I’m planning on becoming an apprentice.”

“Apprentice? You mean…” Kairi glances helplessly at the massive terminal Naminé stands by, then at Ienzo as he comes in carrying a pristine white lab coat. One that’s perfectly Naminé-sized.

Naminé nods. “I think my powers will be useful here. Data, memories… they’re more similar than I first thought.”

Kairi takes a deep breath, lungs expanding in what few gaps the vines in her chest leave open. She almost chokes on her own tongue. If she weren’t a princess, if she hadn’t trained to shield others from her own ugliness, she would have. “I see. You’ll do fantastically.”

“Good to see you, Kairi,” Ienzo says, still speaking as if his own humanity remains a novelty. “Naminé, please go check in with Even to see if he needs anything. Kairi and I have other matters to discuss.”

A way out.

It is too late to be strong. 

Kairi tries regardless.

“It’s okay, Ienzo. She can stay.”

Naminé does slip away at one point. She returns halfway through an explanation that soars over Kairi’s head - something about data, and connection, and hearts of the world and pure lights and all the words she wishes she never knew - with someone Kairi had hoped not to see.

Riku.

When she finally sleeps, he is at her side. 

It is not a happy goodbye.

Naminé stands in the corner of the room, a ghost haunting the lab in her pristine white coat. 

* * *

Kairi finds Naminé on the shores of Destiny Islands, a small pile of seashells assembled in front of her.

“They’re so pretty,” Naminé says, holding one up to the sky. Sunlight sparkles off its iridescent insides. 

“They are,” Kairi agrees, coming to crouch next to her. She wraps her arms around her knees, but finds that she doesn’t need to. Balance comes easier in her dreams. “Naminé?”

“Yes?”

“Are you real?”

She thinks briefly of the other people who populate her dreams. Fragments of memories in motion and ghosts of her pasts, haunting her and taunting her in equal measure.

She looks into Naminé’s eyes. All she finds there is cool water. “I am.”

Kairi gives up on appearances. She crashes into the sand, lets her legs sprawl out in ways that she really shouldn't while wearing a dress. Naminé pays no mind. 

Kairi takes a seashell from the pile. “I like them,” she says. Then, emboldened by the way the vines can’t crawl up her throat here, “But I think you’re prettier.”

Naminé’s blush stains her skin like watercolor.

* * *

Naminé can’t bring Kairi’s portrait with her into the realm of sleep, but she can create it in shades of approximation so close to the real thing that it stops mattering.

In that canvas, stained in the gentle colors of sunset, Kairi sees not the girl she is, but the girl she wishes she was.

“I know it was hard for you to stay still for that long, with your wrist how it is,” Naminé explains, “But it still came out perfectly. Thank you.”

The painting is gorgeous. It sparkles with joy, a clear labor of something close enough to love to be mistaken as such.

* * *

Kairi lets herself have this: Naminé, illuminated by the sunrise, surf kissing her ankles, her sweet smile directed towards no one but Kairi.

Kairi takes her hands and holds them tight. She wonders if this is what it feels like to hold a canary, to feel soft feathers and air-light bones that help birds be the freest animal in all the worlds.

If Kairi could paint, she’d capture this moment in ink and oil and never let it go.

She settles instead for memorizing the way Naminé’s hands feel in hers, the way her cool smiles and calm tranquility exorcises all the ghosts Kairi has ever been haunted by.

She does not have to be a princess. Naminé does not have to be a witch. 

Kairi breathes, and even the air is sweet in her lungs.


End file.
